Fallen to Earth
by Mirrorchaser
Summary: Did you feel empty at the end of Rapture? Did you have unanswered questions? I have decided to rewrite the entire series, keeping the major plot points but making Luce less whiny, Daniel less of a jerk, and their relationship more substantive! As a bonus, you will also get an answer to all those questions that you were left with. Chapters uploaded weekly! Check it out!


Author's Note: Hello! If you are here I imagine you read the Fallen series and were deeply unsettled by the number of open storylines, unsatisfying endings to the few that were tied up, and the complete lack of substance in our main characters. I am here to rectify that! I will be rewriting the Fallen series one chapter at a time. If you read this first chapter compared to the first chapter of the book, you will see that Luce already is less selfish and whiny which I am expecting to go well for everyone involved. If you think of any questions you never had answered or something that just didn't make sense to you, let me know in the comments and I will work an answer in for you! Also, I promise I am writing it chapter by chapter so this first chapter here is a rewrite of ONLY the book's first chapter.

In her typical fashion, Luce barged into the dimly lit hall of Sword & Cross Reform School ten minutes later than she should have. It would have been too kind for the welcome wagon to wait on her and too easy if she hadn't been the last one to arrive. The heavy wooden door slammed behind her but no one turned to look her way. The small group of present students huddled around a tall she-man of a teacher in the middle of the echoing room.

The teacher was already well into her (his?) introductory speech, telling the students in front of her something that sounded like, "… it is meds, beds, and reds," then very clearly, "Follow the rules and no one gets hurt." Despite the barking tone and the deeply settled frown on the teachers face, that sounded good to Luce. Medication and whatever the "reds" are aside, she was content to know that if she followed the rules, no one would get hurt. She was sick of people getting hurt. Before the guilt had a chance to take hold of her soul yet again, she quietly hurried to join the group, focusing on the teacher's shaven head to avoid looking into her eyes.

Feeling a moment of bravery, Luce spoke up, "Could you, uh, could you repeat that?" she asked the attendant, "What was it, meds - ?"

"Well, look what the storm blew in," the attendant said loudly, then continued, enunciating slowly: "Meds. If you're one of the medicated students, this is where you go to keep yourself doped up, sane, breathing, whatever." Woman, Luce decided, studying the attendant. No man would be catty enough to say all that in such a saccharine tone of voice.

"Got it." Luce felt her stomach heave. "Meds." The woman was speaking about her, though she may not have known it. Luce was at a reform school and they were going to heavily medicate her. Ever since the moment the judge told her what her options were, a long trial and prison time or lots of doctor appointments and a reform school close by, Luce waged a war within her mind trying to decide which of the options was a lesser blow to her pride. The options seemed so simple to someone on the outside but how do you admit to yourself that you need to be locked away to protect those around you?

Medication and doctor's visits were not a new experience for Luce by any means. She had been sitting in a ripped and uncomfortable leather chair telling stiff middle-aged women about her feelings once a week since she had been six years old. The difference was that she had finally come so close to convincing those around her that she was sane. That the psychosis they diagnosed her with was a mistake. For a short while, she was even allowed to be released from the scheduled pill popping that the doctors said would make her a normal child. She moved to Dover Preparatory Academy in New Hampshire to be closer to her doctor and far away from the gaping stares and comments of her peers who had always known her as Loopy Lucy back home in Thunderbolt.

She had been doing amazing at Dover but after the accident this summer, Luce lost her ability to be normal. At least here at Sword & Cross, she would not be the worst case… she hoped. So that is why she chose to enroll for her senior year here. Unfortunately, trials happened to cripple her timeline which lead her to enroll an entire month after classes had begun for everyone else. On the short ride from her green Georgia home through the swamp and to Sword & Cross on the other side of town many things bounced back and forth in Luce's brain. Ever the bookworm, her biggest concern was being able to catch up in her studies when the other students were already settled. Fortunately, it looked like a few other students were arriving with her. Luce guessed that she wasn't the only kid in town sentenced to Sword & Cross in lieu of criminal detention or the sterile environment of a local psych ward.

As the attendant droned on about different extra-curricular activities offered at the school, Luce took a moment to take in her surroundings. Looking at the faces around her, Luce wondered if she looked as harmless as the other kids being welcomed to Sword & Cross with her. Standing beside her were two boys and one girl, only one of whom she would have expected in a place like this. The girl had perfect blond hair that fell to her breasts in curls that were natural but not frizzy, which made Luce feel self-conscious about her own short black locks. Noticing Luce's stares, the blonde girl held out a perfectly manicured hand and introduced herself in a drawl that Luce didn't quite recognize from her youth in northern, Georgia, but knew as a fellow southerner just the same. "I'm Gabbe," the girl said. At first, Luce thought that she could make a friend in Gabbe but the smile on Gabbe's face disappeared as quickly as it had come and she turned away before Luce could introduce herself. Instead, Luce turned her attention to the boy standing on her right side. He had soft looking brown hair, glasses, and his eyes trained on the floor like he didn't want to recognize his surroundings. She couldn't shake the feeling that he may be just as embarrassed to be there as she was.

Then to Luce's right, there was another boy who looked exactly like the picture Luce had gotten when she heard the words "reform school" for the first time. He was tall and thin, with a Di bag slung over his shoulder, shaggy black hair, and large, deep-set green eyes. His lips were full and a natural rose color most girls would kill for. At the back of his neck, a black tattoo in the shape of a sunburst seemed almost to glow on his light skin, rising from the edge of his black T-shirt.

When she caught his eye, he didn't look away. His mouth was set in a straight line, but his eyes were warm and alive. He gazed at her, standing as still as a sculpture, which made Luce feel rooted to her spot, too. She sucked in her breath. He stared at her with an alluring intensity that she was not used to.

A loud phlegmy noise from the attendant broke into their moment, which Luce then realized was on purpose. "Those of you who've learned the ropes are free to go after you dump your hazards." The attendant gestured at a large cardboard box under a sign that said in big black letters PROHIBITED MATERIALS, "And when I say free, Todd" - she clamped a hand down on the freckled kid's shoulder, making him jump - "I mean gymnasium-bound to meet your preassigned student guides. You" - she pointed at Luce - "dump your hazards and stay with me."

Luce was unsure what the attendant, – Luce glanced at her name tag – Randy, had meant by "hazards". As if on cue, the other kids started pulling things out of their pockets. Luce thought that maybe their contraband was a window into how they ended up at Sword & Cross and she suddenly felt strangely subconscious for not bringing anything of her own. She was never able to fit in anywhere, not even at the reform school. Angelic Gabbe dropped a pink swiss army knife into the bin, followed by green eyes who deposited a can of spray paint. Lastly, the brown-haired boy, Todd, shuffled up and placed a book of matches and a small container of lighter fluid softly into the box, moving to retrieve his cell phone next… Luce began to shake, tears of frustration welling up in her eyes. She looked closer at the box and realized that it said cell phones were prohibited. She had not had the chance to tell her parents or her best friend, Callie, a proper goodbye. She assumed that she would have the chance to talk to them this evening, to tell them about her day. She glanced down and her phone and saw a missed call and two text messages from Callie.

Callie was her only true friend in the world. She was there on Luce's first day at Dover when it felt like she was lost in a sea of legacy kids who got the white privilege gene that Luce was supposed to have but somehow seemed to miss. Ever since that orientation day in New Hampshire they were inseparable and did not leave each other's side until they had to. Unfortunately, Luce realized, this was "have to". Luce looked up to find all the other kids staring and her and felt her cheeks getting flushed when it dawned on her that Randy had been attempting to talk to her.

"Oh, there she is!" Randy said, giving Luce a few firm pats on the cheek, "Don't swoon on me, kid, they don't pay me enough to resuscitate. Besides, you get one phone call once a week in the main lobby." Luce suddenly felt betrayed when she realized that her parents must have known. It would explain their drawn faces when she said goodbye that morning, with a promise to call them after class. It would explain their faces that she mistook for anger at breakfast which was sorrow in knowing that it would be the last time they heard their daughter's light jokes for a long time. Suddenly, her Dad's voice popped into her head reminding her the "Prices never crash".

Prices never crash. With that thought in mind, Lucinda Price let her cell phone drop into the box, landing with a soft thud. It could have been the sound of loneliness, of her past slipping away, but instead, Luce smiled. It was the sound of a new chapter. It was the sound of what simply had to be. For some, this may have been a roadblock, but Prices never crash.

The empowerment from her confidence began to fade as the other kids in the group started to walk away. Luce knew that they weren't her friends, they just happened to arrive when she did, but she couldn't help but feel like her lifelines were walking out of her little part of the world. She wanted to believe that one of those other kids had given her the rush of sureness she felt a moment ago, having a hard time believing that the power had come from within herself. Much to Luce's surprise, the handsome boy with who had just given up his spray paint stayed next to Luce.

"I can fill her in," he said, nodding at Luce.

"Not part of our deal," the attendant replied automatically as if she'd been expecting this dialogue. "You're a new student again - that means new-student restrictions. Back to square one. You don't like it, you should have thought twice before breaking parole."

Luce stiffened, realizing that she had almost hoped she was wrong in her assumption that he belonged at Sword & Cross. By the looks of the conversation she had listened to, he not only belonged at Sword & Cross but he was actually a frequent flyer in petty crimes and mischief. The boy stood motionless as Randy tugged on the sleeve of Luce's black sweatshirt, pulling her toward one of the hallways.

"Moving on," she said as if nothing had just happened. "Beds." She pointed out the west-facing window to a distant cinder-block building. Luce could see Gabbe and Todd shuffling slowly toward them, with the third boy walking slowly as if catching up to them was the last thing on his list of things to do.

Sword & Cross had an interesting visual appeal. Luce looked across one of the drab courtyard areas to the dormitory building. She could see the black mold along the building and the phantom scent crept into her nose, though she knew it would be impossible to smell it from where she was with Randy. The windows were covered with gleaming stainless-steel bars, the only thing on the entire campus that seemed to shine in the morning sun. Also catching the light, but only here and there with a small twinkle was what looked to be barbed wire topping the building. Sword & Cross reminded Luce of a castle that she had dreamed of living in as a girl mixed with nightmarish visions from a state penitentiary.

Randy flipped through the chart in her hand quickly, and Luce noticed her picture on the top of the page accompanied by a lot of writing in Times New Roman. Her file. Either this was not the first time Randy read the file or she had seen much worse than Luce's. Without a change in expression, Randy found what she was looking for and dropped the clipboard back to her side. "You're in room 63 over there. You can take your bag to my office and unpack it this evening." Luce dragged her bag over to the office and set it against the wall where three other black bags laid. Her red duffel bag was the other bit of color in the entire room. She tried to commit her room number to memory, hoping that it would not get lost in her brain. She had a sneaking suspicion that she would want to avoid spending time with Randy if possible in the future, including a quick visit to hear her room number again. One last look at Luce's duffel bag triggered a question that she wanted to ask before Randy sent her on her way.

"And what about, what did you say - the reds?" Luce asked the attendant, ready to be released from the tour.

"Reds," Randy said, pointing toward a small wired device hanging from the ceiling: a lens with a flashing red light. Luce hadn't seen it before, but as soon as Randy pointed the first one out, she realized they were everywhere.

"Cameras?"

"Very good," Randy said, voice dripping condescension. "We make them obvious in order to remind you. All the time, everywhere, we're watching you. So don't screw up - that is, if you can help yourself."

Every time someone talked to Luce like she was a total psychopath, she came that much closer to believing it was true.

All summer, the guilt had haunted her. Memories of that night replayed in her head every time she shut her eyes or was left alone with only her mind as company. She got lost in the visions that never stopped until she was right on the cusp of remembering what was important. Something had happened in that cabin, and everyone (including Luce) was dying to know exactly what. The police, the judge, the social worker had all tried to pry the truth out of her, but she was as clueless about it all as they were. She and Trevor had been joking around the whole evening, chasing each other down to the row of cabins on the lake, away from the rest of the party. She'd tried to explain that it had been one of the best nights of her life until it turned into the worst.

She'd spent so much time replaying that night in her head, hearing Trevor's laugh, feeling his hands close around her waist, and trying to reconcile her gut instinct that she really was innocent.

But now, every rule and regulation at Sword & Cross seemed to work against that notion, seemed to suggest that she was, in fact, dangerous and needed to be controlled.

Luce felt a firm hand on her shoulder.

"Look," Randy said. "If it makes you feel any better, you're far from the worst case here."

It was the first humane gesture the attendant had made toward Luce, and she believed that it was intended to make her feel better but it didn't. She'd been sent here because of the suspicious death of the guy she'd been crazy about, and still, she was "far from the worst case here"? Luce wondered what else exactly they were dealing with at Sword & Cross.

"Okay, orientation's over," the attendant said. "You're on your own now. Here's a map if you need to find anything else." She gave Luce a photocopy of a crude hand-drawn map, then glanced at her watch.

"You've got an hour before your first class, but my soaps come on in five, so" - she waved her hand at Luce - "make yourself scarce. And don't forget," she said, pointing up at the cameras one last time. "The reds are watching you."

Before Luce could reply, a skinny, dark-haired girl appeared in front of her, wagging her long fingers in Luce's face. "Ooh, the reds are watching you!" she crooned like the ghost tour guides in Savannah would do. Luce always used to beg her mother to go on a ghost tour for her birthday when she was little until the haunting stories stopped being a fun event downtown and became a constant nightmare in her mind.

"Get out of here, Arriane, before I have you lobotomized," Randy barked, though it was clear from her first brief yet genuine smile that she had some coarse affection for the crazy girl.

It was also clear that Arriane did not reciprocate the love. She mimed a jerking-off motion at the attendant, then stared at Luce, daring her to be offended.

"And just for that," Randy jotted a furious note in her book, "you've earned yourself the task of showing Little Miss Sunshine around today."

Luce was expecting a groan from Arianne, but she did not seem to act like being tasked with babysitting was a chore. Arianne was a pretty girl and though her dark hair and eyes were a stark contrast to Gabbe's, they were still gorgeous. It was a strange similarity that left Luce stunned. What happened to reform school kids being ugly and scary criminals? Unlike Gabbe though, Arianne's wardrobe more closely resembled what Luce was wearing. Not that thinking of that made Luce feel any better seeing as the dress code at Sword & Cross was "anything modest and black in color". She loved how the dress code was a nice way for the administration to give the illusion of freedom while reminding their charges that they were not actually free.

Arriane sized her up, tapping one finger against her pale lips. "Perfect," she said, stepping forward to loop her arm through Luce's. "I was just thinking I could really use a new slave." Before Luce was able to start moving, the lobby doors opened wide and the tall boy with green eyes, whose name Luce still did not know, was back.

"This place isn't afraid to do a strip search. So if you're packing any other hazards" - he raised an eyebrow and dumped a handful of unrecognizable in the box - "save yourself the trouble."

Behind Luce, Arriane laughed under her breath. The boy's head shot up, and when his eyes registered Arriane, he opened his mouth, then closed it, like he was unsure how to proceed.

"Arriane," he said evenly.

"Cam," she returned.

"You know him?" Luce whispered, wondering whether there were the same kinds of cliques in reform schools as there were in prep schools like Dover.

"Don't remind me," Arriane said, dragging Luce out the door into the gray and swampy morning.

The back of the main building let out onto a chipped sidewalk bordering a messy field. The grass was so overgrown, it looked more like a vacant lot than a school commons, but a faded scoreboard and a small stack of wooden bleachers argued otherwise.

Beyond the commons lay four severe-looking buildings: the cinder-block dormitory on the far left, a huge old ugly church on the far right, and two other expansive structures in between that Luce imagined were the classrooms.

This was it. Her whole world was reduced to the sorry sight before her eyes.

The more Luce looked, the more she noticed that the campus was laden with religious images. The church, the gargoyles perched atop several of the buildings portraying the likes of Satan, the stained glass windows with crosses and other heavenly depictions. It made her wonder if Sword & Cross had ever been anything other than what it was when she arrived or if it was always intended to rehabilitate the youngest of the state's criminally insane.

Luce constantly had a habit of dreaming up crazy stories of girls just like her who had lived in the places she went. It had always made her feel more invested in where she was going, but she often wondered if it was just a side effect of the psychosis that she liked to call imagination instead. Her mind began to wander. Sword & Cross may have been home to a southern belle and her family or a few dozen soldiers but before she got any father in her thoughts she realized that there was no point in dreaming up a girl that grew up singing hymns in the church on the property. The only story Luce needed to focus on writing at this school was her own.

Arriane immediately veered right off the path and led Luce to the field, sitting her down on top of one of the waterlogged wooden bleachers.

The football field at Dover had always been full of her sweaty classmates, participating in whatever sport it was that would get them a full ride scholarship to their Ivy League school of choice, and their Gabbe-esque girlfriends cheering them on in between coats of nail polish, so Luce had always avoided hanging out there. It wasn't that she thought she was better than them, but she knew that none of them would ever be interested in her and there was far too much commotion to sit and think on your own. But this empty field, with its rusted, warped goals, told a very different story. One that wasn't as easy for Luce to figure out.

The wind shifted and Luce suddenly felt chilled. It was so hard for her to remember how close to home she truly was, standing a moment like that. Nothing about the school reminded her of home. The air was colder, the sky was grayer, and mist hung in the air like a downpour that had been paused by some greater power. "Prices never crash," she reminded herself. It had not even been two hours since she had arrived at Sword & Cross, making judgments about the place that soon was hypocritical. She sometimes wished people would give her more than that long to make a decision about her.

"Soooo," Arriane said. "Now you've met Randy."

"I thought his name was Cam."

"We're not talking about him," Arriane said quickly. "I mean she-man in there." Arriane jerked her head toward the office where they'd left the attendant in front of the TV. "Whaddya think - dude or chick?"

"Uh, chick?" Luce said tentatively. "Is this a test?"

Arriane cracked a smile. "The first of many. And you passed. At least, I think you passed. The gender of most of the faculty here is an ongoing, schoolwide debate. Don't worry, you'll get into it."

Luce thought Arriane was making a joke, but she was already so unsure of everything at Sword & Cross, without her peers to worry about. This was all such a huge change from Dover. At her old school, the green-tie-wearing, pomaded future senators had practically oozed through the halls in the genteel hush that money seemed to lay over everything.

Often, the other Dover kids gave Luce a don't-smudge-the-white-walls-with-your-fingerprints sideways glance. She tried to imagine Arriane there: lazing on the bleachers, making a loud, crude joke in her peppery voice.

Arianne made herself comfortable on one of the bleachers, seemingly unconcerned about the rotted wood giving way underneath her. "So, the age-old question," she asked, "what did you do to end up here?"

Arianne didn't seem to be interrogating Luce and had a playful air about her. Intention aside, Luce couldn't help but freeze up when she processed what Arianne had asked. She felt stupid. She had spent all morning so far trying to remind herself that her calmness was more than a façade, but the past always finds a way to creep up on her and ruin whatever progress she had made. Of course, people here were going to want to know. Asking someone what they did to wind up in a reform school is probably the juvenile hall equivalent to asking a child how old they are or asking your hairstylist if that is their natural color.

Luce wanted to answer her question. Whether it was her own desire to know or whether she just didn't want to ruin the only relationship she had here, she had a desire deep within her soul to be able to tell Arianne exactly what had happened… but when she thought back to that sticky summer's night all she could remember was heat and the shadows. Those dark, indefinable things that she could never tell anyone about.

She had seen them that night, and that she was sure of. They weren't like the other ones that followed her in her life. The shadows that she saw that night didn't cling to the edges of the room, they didn't hover within other – natural - shadows in the room. They formed a thick black cloud in the middle of the room, six feet tall and about as wide as the couch she and Trevor were laying on. She pushed him off to warn him but the moment that his skin left hers, he burst into flames. It was too late. She had been trying to remember for months how the fire started and how she ended up outside on the grass, leaving the cabin to burn and Trevor to his blazing end inside. Trevor was gone, his body burned beyond recognition and Luce had no idea if she was guilty.

No one knew about the murky shapes she sometimes saw in the darkness. They'd come and gone for so long that Luce couldn't even remember the first time she'd seen them. But she could remember the first time she realized that the shadows didn't come for anyone but her. When she was seven, her family had been on vacation in Hilton Head and her parents had taken her on a boat trip. It was just about sunset when the shadows started rolling in over the water, and she'd turned to her father and said, "What do you do when they come, Dad? Why aren't you afraid of the monsters?"

There were no monsters, her parents assured her, but Luce's repeated insistence on the presence of something wobbly and dark had gotten her several appointments with the family eye doctor, and then glasses, and then appointments with the ear doctor after she made the mistake of describing the hoarse whooshing noise that the shadows sometimes made - and then therapy, and then more therapy, and finally the prescription for anti-psychotic medication.

But nothing ever made them go away.

By the time she was fourteen, Luce refused to take her meds. That was when they found Dr. Sanford and the Dover School nearby. They flew to New Hampshire, and her father drove their rental car up a long, curved driveway to a hilltop mansion called Shady Hollows. They planted Luce in front of a man in a lab coat and asked her if she still saw her "visions." Her parents' palms were sweating as they gripped her hands, brows furrowed with the fear that there was something terribly wrong with their daughter.

No one came out and said that if she didn't tell Dr. Sanford what they all wanted her to say, she might be seeing a whole lot more of Shady Hollows. When she lied and acted normal, she was allowed to enroll at Dover, and only had to visit Dr. Sanford twice a month.

Luce had been permitted to stop taking the horrible pills as soon as she started pretending she didn't see the shadows anymore. But she still had no control over when they might appear. All she knew was that the mental catalog of places where they'd come for her in the past - dense forests, murky waters - became the places she avoided at all costs. All she knew was that when the shadows came, they were usually accompanied by a cold chill under her skin, a sickening feeling unlike anything else.

Luce moved the hand that had made it up to cover her face at some point back down to her side and sat. She looked at Arianne's expectant face, realizing that she had still not answered her question, but was unsure how to avoid the question. She knew that she wasn't ready to answer it. Fortunately, Arianne moved on telling Luce, "Hey! Cut my hair like yours."

"What?" Luce gasped, "Your hair is beautiful", and it was true. Arianne's hair color was black like Luce's but it was an upgraded black, one that looked red when the rare patch of sunlight would hit it. It fell in loose waves around her, stopping at her waist. Luce would have given anything to have her long black hair back and Arianne just wanted hers cut off by a girl she just met?

Luce subconsciously moved to put a piece of her own black hair behind her ear, feeling her heart break just a little when it fell right back to where she moved it from. It was just hair but to her, it was another painful reminder of that night. After the fire, her hair had been singed unevenly by the flames and the damage was too large to fix with a light trim.

The night of the accident turned into day before Luce was finally allowed to leave with her parents. Prior to boarding the plane home, she had been mostly in shock but after the sun had long since come up, and the police officers had all long since went away, Luce's dad carried her up the stairs in their house and sat her in the bathtub where she began to cry every tear that she had been holding in. Then, through those uncontrollable tears, Luce watched her mother slowly chop off her curls piece by piece until she was left with a messy pixie cut. Under other circumstances, maybe Luce would have loved the change. She would have arrived to class and Callie would have screeched, asking what had possessed her to cut her hair and then after looking at a few different angles, she would have said that it was okay because it made Luce look like Rizzo from Grease. But when Luce looked in the mirror that next morning, she didn't look like Rizzo from Grease. She looked like the crazy girl from Georgia who set her crush on fire.

Now her hair hung just barely hung down past her ear in most spots, other portions of her mother's hack job shorter but disguised as purposeful layers. "I just don't understand why you would want to cut your gorgeous hair and turn it into this," Luce said.

"Beautiful schmootiful," Arriane said. "Yours is sexy, edgy. And I want it." Luce pondered Arianne's sentiment for a moment and then threw her caution to the wind. Who was she to decide what Arianne could and couldn't want? Let her be Rizzo, at least it would be her choice. Maybe Luce had something to learn from this mysterious girl in front of her.

"Okay, sure," Luce told her finally, "But where are we going to get a –" before she could finish, Arianne whipped out a little pink swiss army knife – the one that Gabbe had put in the prohibited material's bin half an hour earlier.

"What?" she said, seeing Luce's reaction. "I always bring my sticky fingers on new-student drop-off days."

"What about the reds?" Luce asked, glancing around with the knife in her hand. There were bound to be cameras somewhere out here.

Arriane shook her head. "I refuse to associate with pansies. Can you handle it or not?"

Luce nodded.

"And don't tell me you've never cut hair before." Arriane grabbed the Swiss Army knife back from Luce, pulled out the scissor tool, and handed it back. "Not another word until you tell me how fantastic I look."

Luce gathered Arianne's hair into two lopsided pigtails on top of her hair and began to hack at them. She figured that Arianne clearly didn't care much how it looked and she could always even it out later. The ponytail fell to her feet and Arriane gasped and whipped around. She picked it up and held it to the sun. Luce's heart constricted at the sight. She still agonized over her own lost hair and all the other losses it symbolized. But Arriane just let a thin smile spread across her lips. She ran her fingers through the ponytail once, then dropped it into her bag.

"Awesome," she said. "Keep going." While Luce attempted to even out the first haircut she'd ever given, Arriane delved into the complexities of life at Sword & Cross.

"That cell block over there is Augustine. It's where we have our so-called Social events on Wednesday nights. And all of our classes," she said, pointing at a building the color of yellowed teeth, two buildings to the right of the dorm.

It looked like it had been designed by the same sadist who'd done Pauline. It was dismally square, dismally fortresslike, fortified by the same barbed wire and barred windows. An unnatural-looking gray mist cloaked the walls like moss, making it impossible to see whether anyone was over there.

"Fair warning," Arriane continued. "You're going to hate the classes here. You wouldn't be human if you didn't."

"Why? What's so bad about them?" Luce asked. Education had always been the one thing that could make her feel sane. Maybe Arianne just didn't like school in general. She had a feeling that a lot of the kids here were used to skipping classes before they ended up under the reds.

"The classes here are soulless," Arriane said. "Worse, they'll strip you of your soul. Of the eighty kids in this place, I'd say we've only got about three remaining souls." She glanced up. "Unspoken for, anyway ..."

That didn't sound promising, but Luce was hung up on another part of Arriane's answer. "Wait, there are only eighty kids in this whole school?" When Luce first started coming to terms with the idea of Sword & Cross, she told herself that she would just do her best to fly under the radar. That would be hard with the entire student body here being smaller than only her class at Dover.

Arriane nodded, making Luce accidentally snip off a chunk of hair she'd meant to leave. Whoops. Hopefully, Arriane wouldn't notice - or maybe she'd just think it was edgy.

"Eight classes, ten kids a pop. You get to know everybody's crap pretty quickly," Arriane said. "And vice versa."

"I guess so," Luce agreed, biting her lip. Arriane was joking, but Luce wondered whether she'd be sitting here with that cool smirk in her pastel blue eyes if she knew the exact nature of Luce's backstory. The longer Luce could keep her past under wraps, the happier she'd be.

"And you'll want to steer clear of the hard cases."

"Hard cases?"

"The kids with the wristband tracking devices," Arriane said. "About a third of the student body."

"And they're the ones who - "

"You don't want to mess with. Trust me."

"Well, what'd they do?" Luce asked. Whatever those kids had done couldn't be much worse than what everyone told her she had done. Unless it was. The possibilities stirred up a cold gray fear in the pit of her stomach.

"Oh, you know," Arriane drawled. "Aided and abetted terrorist acts. Chopped up their parents and roasted them on a spit." She turned around to wink at Luce.

"Shut up," Luce said.

"I'm serious. Those psychos are under much tighter restrictions than the rest of the screwups here. We call them the shackled."

Luce laughed at Arriane's dramatic tone.

"Your haircut's done," she said, running her hands through Arriane's hair to fluff it up a little. Luce admired how happy Arianne looked, running her hands through her hair. She had no clue what she looked like but she either had blind trust or just didn't care. Luce wasn't sure which but she also wasn't sure that it mattered.

"Sweet," Arriane said. She turned to face Luce. When she ran her fingers through her hair, the sleeves of her black sweater fell back on her forearms and Luce caught a glimpse of a black wristband, dotted with rows of silver studs, and, on the other wrist, another band that looked more ... mechanical. Arriane caught her looking and raised her eyebrows devilishly.

"Told ya," she said. "Total effing psychos." She grinned. "Come on, I'll give you the rest of the tour."

Luce jumped off the bleacher, scrambling after Arriane, who didn't seem to notice Luce trip over a tree root growing out of the ground. Arriane pointed at a lichen-swathed church at the far right of the commons.

"Over here, you'll find our state-of-the-art gymnasium," she said, assuming a nasal tour guide tone of voice. "Yes, yes, to the untrained eye it looks like a church. It used to be. We're kind of in an architectural hand-me-down Hell here at Sword & Cross. A few years ago, some callisthenic-crazed shrink showed up ranting about overmedicated teens ruining society. He donated a shit- ton of money so they'd convert it into a gym. Now the powers that be think we can work out our 'frustrations' in a 'more natural and productive way.'"

As Luce jogged to keep up, she took in the rest of the grounds. Sword & Cross looked like it had been plopped down and abandoned in the middle of a swamp. Weeping willows dangled to the ground, kudzu grew along the walls in sheets, and every third step they took squished.

And it wasn't just the way the place looked. Every humid breath Luce took stuck in her lungs. Just breathing at Sword & Cross made her feel like she was sinking into quicksand.

"Apparently the architects got in a huge standoff over how to retrofit the style of the old military academy buildings. The upshot is we ended up with half penitentiary, half medieval torture zone. And no gardener," Arriane said, kicking some slime off her combat boots. "Gross. Oh, and there's the cemetery."

Luce followed Arriane's pointing finger to the far left side of the quad, just past the dormitory. An even thicker cloak of mist hung over the walled-off portion of land. It was bordered on three sides by a thick forest of oaks. She couldn't see into the cemetery, which seemed almost to sink below the surface of the ground, but she could smell the rot and hear the chorus of cicadas buzzing in the trees. For a second, she thought she saw the dark swish of the shadows - but she blinked and they were gone.

"That's a cemetery?"

"Yep. This used to be a military academy, way back in the Civil War days. So that's where they buried all their dead. It's creepy as all get-out. And lawd," Arriane said, piling on a fake southern accent, "it stinks to high Heaven." Then she winked at Luce. "We hang out there a lot."

So there is the history, Luce mused. A military academy for boys near and far away from home, learning to fight a war against their own people. Suddenly, her imagination began to run wild again, imagining the much too young soldiers marching across the lawn and their nurses inside wondering if they will have babies of their own just to send off to war.

Luce looked at Arriane. "Do you actually hang out in the cemetery?"

"Okay, it was only once. And it was only after a really big pharmapalooza." Arianne began laughing hysterically when she saw Luce's face. "Aha! Well, Luce, my dear, you may have gone to boarding school parties, but you've never seen a throw-down like reform school kids do it."

"What's the difference?" Luce asked, trying to skirt the fact that she'd never actually been to a big party at Dover and she tried to avoid taking medication as opposed to making it a supplementary activity.

"You'll see." Arriane paused and turned to Luce. "You'll come over tonight and hang out, okay?" She surprised Luce by taking her hand. "Promise?"

"But I thought you said I should stay away from the hard cases," Luce joked.

"Rule number two - don't listen to me!" Arriane laughed, shaking her head. "I'm certifiably insane!"

She started jogging again and Luce trailed after her.

"Wait, what was rule number one?"

"Keep up!"

As they came around the corner of the cinder-block classrooms, Arriane skidded to a halt. "Act cool," she said.

"Cool," Luce repeated.

All the other students seemed to be clustered around the kudzu-strangled trees outside Augustine. No one looked happy to be hanging out, but no one looked ready to go inside yet, either.

There hadn't been much of a dress code at Dover, so Luce wasn't used to the uniformity it gave a student body. Then again, even though every kid here was wearing the same four pieces there were still substantial differences in the way they pulled it off.

Seeing the entirety of the Sword & Cross student body here together answered Luce's earlier question of reform school cliques.

A group of tattooed girls standing in a crossed-armed circle wore bangle bracelets up to their elbows. The sideways squint of the girl's darkly lined cat-eyes made Luce quickly shift the direction of her gaze. She had a feeling that was a club you needed to be invited into.

A guy and a girl who were holding hands and wearing matching skull and cross bone sweaters stood off to the side of the group. Every few seconds, one of them would pull the other in for a kiss on the temple, on the earlobe, on the eye. When they looped their arms around each other, Luce could see that each wore the blinking wristband tracking device. They looked a little rough, but it was obvious how much in love they were. They didn't seem to belong to any group, but they belonged to each other. Luce saw a lot of beauty in that. Maybe for some of these kids like her, Sword & Cross is their last stop, but how wonderful was it that these two were able to put their guards down and find real love in a place like this?

Behind the lovers, a cluster of blond boys stood pressed against the wall. Each of them wore his sweater, despite the heat. And they all had on white oxford shirts underneath, the collars starched straight up. Their black pants hit the vamps of their polished dress shoes perfectly. Of all the students on the quad, these boys seemed to Luce to be the closest thing to Doverites. But a closer look quickly set them apart from boys she used to know. Boys like Trevor.

Just standing in a group, these guys radiated a specific kind of toughness. It was right there in the look in their eyes. It was hard to explain, but it suddenly struck Luce that just like her, everyone at this school had a past. Everyone here probably had secrets they wouldn't want to share. But she couldn't figure out whether this realization made her feel more or less isolated.

Arriane noticed Luce's eyes running over the rest of the kids.

"We all do what we can to make it through the day," she said, shrugging. "But in case you hadn't observed the low-hanging vultures, this place pretty much reeks of death." She took a seat on a bench under a weeping willow and patted the spot next to her for Luce.

Luce wiped away a mound of wet, decaying leaves, but just before she sat down, she noticed a student that she hadn't seen in her first pass over the courtyard.

He wore a bright red scarf around his neck, the small rebellious dress code violation making him stand out even more among the group of troubled teens. It was far from cold outside, but he had on a black leather motorcycle jacket over his black sweater, too. Maybe it was because he was the only spot of color on the quad, but he was all that Luce could look at. In fact, everything else so paled in comparison that, for one long moment, Luce forgot where she was.

She took in his deep golden hair and matching tan. His high cheekbones, the dark sunglasses that covered his eyes, the soft shape of his lips. For the first moment, her mind was blank. Luce had never met someone before that had left her truly breathless. And then she began to get frustrated. Everywhere she turned at this school, there was someone else who looks like they belong in an ad campaign for Calvin Klein, not at a reform school in Georgia.

He leaned up against the building with his arms crossed lightly over his chest. And for a split second, Luce saw a flashing image of him in that Confederate soldier uniform walking toward her in nurses garb. She shook the image from her mind, irritated that she had subconsciously used him as inspiration for her newest story.

He was talking to a shorter kid with dreads and a toothy smile. Both of them were laughing hard and genuinely - in a way that made Luce strangely jealous. She tried to think back and remember how long it had been since she'd laughed, really laughed, like that.

"That's Daniel Grigori," Arriane said, leaning in and reading her mind. "I can tell he's attracted somebody's attention."

"Understatement," Luce agreed, embarrassed when she realized how she must have looked to Arriane.

"Yeah, well, if you like that sort of thing."

"What's not to like?" Luce said, unable to stop the words from tumbling out.

"His friend there is Roland," Arriane said, nodding in the dreadlocked kid's direction. "He's cool. The kind of guy who can get his hands on things, ya know?" Not really, Luce thought, biting her lip. "What kinds of things?"

Arriane shrugged, using her poached Swiss Army knife to saw off a fraying strand from a rip in her black jeans. "Just things. Ask-and-you-shall-receive kind of stuff." "What about Daniel?" Luce asked. "What's his story?"

"Oh, she doesn't give up." Arriane laughed, then cleared her throat. "No one really knows," she said. "He holds pretty tight to his mystery man persona. Could just be your typical reform school asshole."

"I'm no stranger to assholes," Luce said, though as soon as the words came out, she wished she could take them back. After what had happened to Trevor - whatever had happened - she was the last person who should be making character judgments. But more than that, the rare time she made even the smallest reference to that night, the shifting black canopy of the shadows came back to her, almost like she was right back at the lake.

She glanced again at Daniel. He took his glasses off and slid them inside his jacket, then turned to look at her.

His gaze caught hers, and Luce watched as his eyes widened and then quickly narrowed in what looked like surprise. But no - it was more than that. When Daniel's eyes held hers, her breath caught in her throat. She recognized him from somewhere.

But she would have remembered meeting someone like him. She would have remembered feeling as absolutely shaken up as she did right now. Where did she know him from? Was he there at Dover? Had she met him in a group session at some time in her life? What did he know about her that made the deep recesses of her mind begin to buzz in warning?

She realized they were still locking eyes when Daniel flashed her a smile. A jet of warmth shot through her and she had to grip the bench for support. She felt her lips pull up into a smile back at him, but then he turned and said something to his friend and they both began to laugh.

Luce gasped and dropped her eyes. She hadn't even been here a full day and she had not failed to make a fool of herself to everyone that she came across. Shake it off, she told herself. Prices never crash.

"What?" Arriane asked, oblivious to what had just gone down. "Never mind," she said. "We don't have time. I sense the bell."

The bell rang as if on cue, and the whole student body started the slow shuffle into the building. Arriane was tugging on Luce's hand and spouting off directions about where to meet her next and when. But Luce was still reeling from feeling like she knew a perfect stranger so personally. Then she remembered that he was making fun of her. Her momentary delirium over Daniel had vanished, and now the only thing she wanted to know was: What was that guy's problem?

Just before she ducked into her first class, she dared to glance back. His face was blank, but there was no mistaking it - he was watching her go.


End file.
